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Archive for December 14th, 2006

Some deals really are too good to be true… and some companies really are too bad to survive.

Consider Mabus Hosting. They offer what seems like a great deal for people needing to run small backup mailservers, nameservers, or things of that sort, with their $5/month VPS plan. They have a lot of seemingly happy customers, so I thought I’d try them out; I could use some space and bandwidth to store old backups and logs and stuff.

I’m underwhelmed. Literally.

They got me setup in an hour or so. It’s been three days, and they still don’t have me setup correctly, despite promises to do so. The resources on their VPS are less then stellar – 64MB maximum RAM (no burst capability, and no swap), 100 maximum processes, and 80 maximum open connections. Remember, kids – a VPS has a lot of artificial limits a real server doesn’t, and it’s most apparent at the bottom end of things.

In the case of Mabus, their network is interesting. I was pretty impressed when I tracerouted their IPs; Level(3) and Mzima all the way, from everywhere I was able to test from. That’s impressively quality bandwidth. From their VPSes is another matter – outgoing, it’s all Cogent, all the time, everywhere. For nickels per gigabyte of transfer, that’s about what I’d expect. Latency and jitter are about average to slightly below par.

Verdict? Unreliable support, harshly throttled (and probably grieviously oversold, if the rather optimistic OpenVZ system website’s guidelines are being followed) system resources, bargain (albeit multihomed) bandwidth, and a price that’s too good to be true. I never thought I’d find a worse deal than Redwood Virtual, but the world never ceases to amaze me. I’ll be looking elsewhere for backup space…